The Captain nodded. “Leave them to point defense. Status on the rail guns?”
“Rail gun range in fifteen seconds,” the Weapons Officer replied.
“Good. Priority for firing solutions is the capital ships in that nearest—”
“Hold simulation,” Scoville said. “So, Stellers, have you seen anything useful so far?”
Thorn shook his head. “No, sir. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.”
“Well, this is where things start to go wrong. Resume simulation.”
“—enemy detachment. They look like they’re trying to flank us . . .”
The Captain broke off, frowning at the summary tactical situation showing on the console built into her chair. “Engineering, what’s with these uncertainty values? They’re all going up.”
Thorn leaned over the Captain, looking at her display. Sure enough, the icons representing the Nyctus ships were now each the apex of an expanding cone reflecting their possible range of maneuvers. That was normal at long ranges, where light-speed delays meant that the target ship had moved since the latest sensor return, so its current actions could only be estimated. But with the range down to just thousands of kilometers, there should be no such fuzz in the locations or trajectories of the Nyctus ships.
“Not sure, sir,” the Engineering Officer replied. “Some sort of scanner degradation. It seems to be affecting . . . shit. It’s affecting all sensors, even visual.”
Thorn looked at the viewscreen. It too depicted increasing uncertainty in the actual locations of the Nyctus ships; more fundamentally, the imagery was fading, as though some sort of diffuse fog coalesced between the Nyctus and ON fleets.
“It’s affecting our firing solutions,” the Weapons Officer called out. “Confidence levels are dropping fast.”
The Captain turned. “Engineering, this is not a good time for our sensors to crap out—”
“Working on it, sir.” The Lieutenant’s fingers danced across the console. “Everything self-tests green.” His voice rose a notch in frustration, fear, maybe both. “It’s all working the way it should!”
“I’ve got news for you, Lieutenant,” the Captain snapped. “No, it’s not.” She waved a hand at the big viewscreen.
Thorn followed her gaze. The imagery had almost completely faded away.
“Hold simulation,” Scoville said, then crossed his arms. “Okay, Stellers, time to earn your pay. Any ideas?”
Thorn frowned. The Nyctus could have developed some sort of jamming effect that targeted the ON sensors—but he was no tech and didn’t doubt that the ON had already thrown their best engineering minds at that possibility. In fact, him being here probably meant that they had come up empty. So he bit his lip and stared at the blankness of the viewscreen.
Something tickled his thoughts, but it was elusive, like a bug flying around the room—heard, but as yet unseen.
“Stellers—?”
“I’d like to see some more, sir, if I could,” he said.
Scoville nodded. “Resume simulation.”
The Captain turned back to the engineering station. “You and your people have one minute to get this sorted out, Lieutenant. If you can’t, I’m going to have to recommend to the flagship that we fall out of line, and I will not be happy about that.”
The Engineering Lieutenant gave a quick nod. “I know, ma’am. We’re working on it.”
“Work faster.”
The Weapons Officer blew out an exasperated sigh. “Firing solutions have dropped below 50 percent.”
“For which weapons?” the Captain asked.
“All of them, ma’am.”
A distant thud sounded, and the deck shuddered. Another followed, then two more, in rapid succession.
“Incoming missiles!” the Weapons Officer said. “Point defense can’t track them!”
“The reactive armor’s doing its job,” the Captain cut in. “For the moment, anyway. But we’re taking hits here, and we can’t even see them coming.” She turned again. “Engineering, last chance.”
The Lieutenant offered the Captain a bleak look. “Sorry, ma’am, we’ve got nothing—no idea what’s happening.”
“We’re getting calls from across the task force,” the Comms Officer put in. “It’s not just us. Sounds like—”
Another ripple of thuds sounded, and then a heavy bang came from somewhere aft. Damage alerts flared across bridge consoles; warnings chimed and buzzed.
The Captain turned to the now-blank viewscreen, and her eyes went wide. “Damn. It’s the Nyctus. Somehow, they’ve blinded us.”
The simulation abruptly froze—this time, without an order from Scoville.
“That’s where the log ends,” the Commodore said. “Based on what we’ve been able to piece together from all the logs we’ve recovered and accounts from the surviving ships, the Centurion took a catastrophic hit at this point. Run simulation Scoville-two.”
The digital ghosts of the Centurion’s crew and bridge vanished, replaced by a tactical map giving an overview of the battle. A cadre of Nyctus ships near the rear of their battle line suddenly vanished, then reappeared in pulses of blue-shifted energy within a few tens of kilometers of the ON battle line.
“I’m no expert,” Thorn said, “but isn’t using Alcubierre drives, or whatever the Nyctus version is, in such crowded space—”
“Asking for disaster? Damned right it is,” Scoville replied. “But the Nyctus had it all pre-plotted, and we assume that includes nav. They were ready for us, the bastards, and we played right into whatever disgusting appendages pass for their hands.”
The Centurion was, Thorn saw, the first of the ON capital ships to be hit and destroyed—and by nothing more than a massive chunk of rock unceremoniously dumped out of the hold of one of the Nyctus ships. There was no plasma flare from an engine, but the rock accelerated at a horrific rate until it slammed into the battlecruiser, virtually breaking her in two. She wasn’t the last, though. More ships staggered under titanic impacts, reeling out of line or just bursting into clouds of shattered debris.
“The Centurion and all the rest of these ships were taken out by boulders, Stellers. Friggin’ boulders, that they couldn’t see coming.” Scoville’s scowl was ripe with disgust. “The Nyctus and their damned shamans. There’s no way those rocks could have been accelerated that hard conventionally, not without being pulverized into gravel.” Jaw muscles clenched, Scoville stared at the miniature scene of carnage.
Thorn just stayed quiet. He didn’t need Joining to tell him that Scoville’s fury wasn’t just focused on the Nyctus, but on magic generally, a vast and unwelcome intrusion into their once-tidy vision of space combat.
“In any case,” the Commodore finally said, “we’ve seen that capability before, so it’s not new to us.”
Thorn nodded. “The Nyctus focus on Earth magic. At least the ones we’ve encountered do, although some of the squid target human beings. What we call Lifer magic.”
Scoville’s gaze went flat, his body utterly still. There was a cloud of potential violence around the man that went against everything an officer was supposed to be: calm, controlled, reasoned. “Earth mages, Lifers, whatever. I don’t speak ’caster, and don’t especially want to. I deal in math. I want a war I can fight, not some childhood myth come alive out here in hard vacuum.”